Shoving Rachel back into the stables, Clint looked over his shoulder and said, “Come in here and help me with this.”
Rachel was kicking and swinging her fists even as she stumbled over a bale of hay. Clint rushed forward and began swearing at her as well as a bunch of others who weren’t even there. All of this created a mix of confusion and curiosity that was just enough to get the Indians moving inside as well.
As both Indians stepped into the stables, their grip tightened around their weapons. That way, when Clint turned Rachel’s pistol on them, they were able to react in a heartbeat. The bigger one pulled a machete out of its scabbard. The smaller one drew a .45, but wasn’t able to clear leather before Clint slammed his knuckles against the man’s wrist.
As the smaller Indian struggled to retract his battered arm, Clint wrapped one hand around his neck and shoved his back against a wall. The Indian’s eyes were wide with surprise, but he wasn’t surprised enough to keep from delivering a few blows of his own.
Clint barely managed to squirm to one side before the smaller Indian brought up his knee. Although the knee didn’t land in its intended spot, it still grazed along Clint’s hip and pounded against his lower ribs. Clint tried to bring his gun around to point it at the Indian’s head before the Indian got to the knife he was reaching for.
But he didn’t make it. The Indian removed his knife from its scabbard and swiped up toward Clint’s chest in one fluid motion.
Meanwhile, the bigger Indian, who had been caught off guard when Clint lunged for his partner’s gun, regained focus and reared back his machete to bury it in Clint’s back. He stopped when he saw movement from the corner of his eye and was just quick enough to avoid getting attacked by Rachel.
Having drawn a knife of her own, she stabbed straight in toward the big Indian’s midsection. Her teeth were bared and there was more than enough force behind her attack to make her a genuine threat. Even so, the big Indian had an amused smile on his face as he twisted out of the way.
“I don’t know who you are,” the big Indian said to her, “but you’ll wish you hadn’t done that.”
Clint backed up a few steps and watched the knife in the smaller Indian’s hand. He twitched again in response to a few quick feints, but saw the Indian back up the real slash with every muscle in his upper body. When the smaller Indian’s blade swiped toward him again, Clint stepped aside and grabbed his attacker’s wrist just above that incoming blade with the same speed he would have drawn his modified Colt.
Without losing his momentum, Clint turned the smaller Indian’s knife back toward him and drove the blade into its owner’s gut. Looking straight into the Indian’s eyes, Clint shoved the blade in deeper until he felt the other man crumple. Before the body hit the floor, Clint turned to see the bigger Indian smacking the blade from Rachel’s hand as if he were disciplining a child.
Clint dropped to one knee so he could take the knife from the hand of the dead Indian on the floor. Snapping his arm like a whip, Clint sent the blade spinning through the air to lodge into the bigger Indian’s back. But rather than drop the Indian, Clint’s efforts only seemed to make him madder.
The big Indian reached around to feel the knife lodged in the bone of his shoulder. His eyes took on an angry fire as he brought his huge machete up over his head. Clint could tell by the big Indian’s stance that he didn’t intend on turning away from Rachel. On the contrary, the Indian looked ready to finish her off and then tend to Clint.
Rather than let the big Indian do what he pleased, Clint got up and ran straight toward him. He tossed Rachel’s gun to the floor, used his right hand to grab hold of the big Indian’s arm while it was still raised and, with his left hand, grabbed hold of the knife still lodged in the Indian’s shoulder.
It was obvious that the big Indian was strong enough to pull his arm free in a matter of seconds, so Clint twisted the knife in the the big Indian’s back until he reacted to the pain. Giving the knife one more turn weakened the big Indian just enough for Clint to rip the machete from his hand.
As much as Clint wanted to drop the machete and pick up the gun he’d dropped, he wasn’t keen on the idea of lowering himself so close to the big Indian’s legs. Although the large man was heaving and unsteady thanks to the pain in his back, he was already pulling himself together.
“Here,” Clint said as he kicked the gun toward Rachel. “Take this and keep him covered, but don’t shoot unless you have to.”
Rachel picked up the gun as soon as she could. Her first instinct was to point it at the big Indian, but her aim soon began to shift between the Indian and Clint.
By this time, the big Indian had managed to get his fingers on the knife in his back and finally pull it out. As soon as the bloody knife was in his hand, he flipped it around so he was holding it by the blade as if he were ready to throw it.
Rachel pointed her gun at the Indian. “Don’t even think about throwing that knife,” she warned.
The Indian lowered his arm and relaxed a bit.
When Rachel looked for Clint, she was unable to find him. Her finger tensed on the trigger, but she knew better than to take her eyes off the Indian for more than a second. She found out the hard way that even a second was too long.
The big Indian’s hand snapped up like it was springloaded and, just as he was about to send the knife into Rachel, he felt a dull thump on the back of his head.
Having watched where Rachel threw his Colt, Clint was able to find it and crack it against the Indian’s skull before the knife was thrown. It took another crack from the pistol butt to drop the Indian to his knees. After that, Clint had one very angry woman to contend with.
TWENTY-TWO
“What the hell are you doing?” Rachel asked.
Clint had already dropped his Colt back in its holster and was rushing to the door of the livery to get a look outside. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“Looks like you might be looking for your friends to arrive.”
“What friends?”
“I don’t know!” Rachel said as she shuffled away from Clint and both Indians, her back to a wall. “First, I thought you were one of them, then I think you might not be, then you take my gun, and now . . . I don’t know what the hell to think!”
Clint held out his hand and waved it at her while crouching and studying the people moving throughout the fort. “Keep your voice down.”
“You’d better start telling me what you’re up to, or I’ll make plenty of noise with this gun in my hand.”
Satisfied that there was nobody else in the abandoned livery, Clint walked back inside. He faced Rachel with both hands held open at waist level. His voice was smooth and calm. “I had to take your gun before you fired a shot. We don’t know how many more of these assholes are around, so we shouldn’t draw any more attention to ourselves.”
“You left me without a weapon,” she said angrily. “I could have been killed.”
“You had a knife. Besides,” Clint added with a shrug, “I did give your gun back.”
“What about calling them over here after you shoved me back? You were asking them to help you.”
“I also said there were more women in here with me. What would you have preferred? That I tell them to please step a little closer so I could stab one of them and knock the other over his head until he drops? I doubt that would have gone over too well.”
“Why did they come to you?” she asked suspiciously. “It seemed like they trusted you.”
Clint let out an aggravated sigh as he looked down at the big man laying on the floor. So far, the Indian was remaining still, but Clint didn’t expect that to last forever. “They didn’t know me and there’s no way in hell you haven’t realized that already. If you’re looking for an excuse to pull the trigger, you’re not going to find a good one. What you’re going to have to do is trust me for a little while.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because,” Clint said as his hand snapped dow
n and came back up with the modified Colt in his grasp, “I could have killed you at any time if that’s what I wanted to do.”
Rachel’s eyes darted to the gun in her hands, but quickly returned to Clint. He’d cleared leather so quickly that she had barely seen him move. The fact that she hadn’t jumped and pulled her trigger was only because she skipped being surprised and went straight to being frozen in place.
She only let out her breath when she saw Clint smile and lower the Colt back into its holster. “How did you know these two would show?”
“I told a woman at the cathouse to come get me at the saloon when Coltraine arrived. Then I came here to watch the saloon and see when the woman came back. That way, even if someone asked her where I was, they wouldn’t know the truth any more than she did.”
“And what were you intending to do when Coltraine did arrive?” Rachel asked. “Crack him on the back of his head with your gun?”
“Actually . . . I was kind of making this up as I go along. All I wanted to do was get some idea of what’s really going on and where these missing girls are being taken.”
“I know where they are being taken,” Rachel said. “They are being traded off to the Crow like a bunch of cattle.”
“Do you know exactly where they are being taken?” Clint asked. “Because that’s the sort of thing we need to know if we’re going to find those women.”
Still staring along the sights of her pistol, Rachel slowly shook her head. “I don’t know exactly.”
Clint grinned and knelt down beside the big, unconscious Indian. “Well, this one right here does. And since we managed to knock him out without calling all his friends over here in the process, we can wake him up and ask him.”
“Wake him up?”
“After some precautions, of course. See if you can find some rope.”
TWENTY-THREE
When the big Indian opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Clint’s smiling face.
“Rise and shine,” Clint said.
The Indian’s first instinct was to jump to his feet and get his hands wrapped around Clint’s throat. The moment he tried to do that, however, was the same moment he realized he’d been hog-tied with double the amount of knots required to keep a full-grown bull from going anywhere. Because of that, the Indian only succeeded in flopping on the floor like a fish that had been pulled out of a stream.
“You’d better settle down, big fella,” Clint said, “or my friend there will be forced to put you down.”
The Indian looked to where Clint was motioning and saw Rachel standing with a pistol in each hand. Her eyes were fierce and both guns were perfectly steady.
“In case you’re wondering,” Clint said, “you’ve been out long enough for your friends to give up on you. Actually, they might not have given up, but they’re not in the fort anymore.”
“What do you want?” the Indian asked. “You must want something or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Very observant. I’d like to know what Coltraine’s been up to lately. I want to know how many women he’s got, where they are now and where they’re going.”
“Why should I tell you?”
“I thought we’ve already covered that,” Clint said, nodding back toward Rachel, who still sighted down both pistols.
The Indian squared his jaw and shifted so he was looking straight up at the roof. After that, he might as well have been a log with rope wrapped around it.
“You’re not going to talk?” Clint asked.
The Indian stayed mute.
“Fine. Maybe you’d like to be reacquainted with another friend of yours.”
Clint disappeared from the Indian’s view for a moment. When he reappeared, he was holding the machete that had been brought into the livery by the Indian himself. Clint wielded the blade like he was cutting through dense bushes. His final slice was purposely aimed to pass within an inch of the Indian’s nose.
“Maybe I should test my aim with this thing,” Clint said. “To be honest, though, I don’t think I’m very good.”
“Bray won’t let you do this,” the Indian said. “Even if you kill me, he’ll hunt you down, and Coltraine will put a price on your head.”
“Are you talking about Sergeant Bray?”
The Indian looked up at Clint and then went silent once more.
Clint hunkered down to the Indian’s level and announced, “You’ve really only got two choices here. You tell us what we need, or we bury you under this floor.”
“You’ll kill me anyway. I can see that much in the woman’s eyes.”
Clint looked over to Rachel and had to admit that he saw the same thing. “Fine,” he said with a shrug. “If you insist on protecting Coltraine, I think that’s real admirable. Especially considering how long you’ve been gone and how he just rode off without so much as searching the fort for you. I mean, this isn’t a very big place.”
“If they’d left, you would already know where they’ve gone.”
“I’ve followed Coltraine long enough. I want to know where he’s headed and I want to know where he takes the women. You’ll be saving me some time by telling me this and I’d cut you loose as a way to thank you. Otherwise, I know some officers at another army post who would be real happy to see you. Some of those cavalry men enjoy getting the occasional live Indian for a change. You’re a big fella, so you might even stay alive for a good day or two once they start in on you.”
After a pause, the Indian said, “Help me sit up.”
Clint obliged and hauled the Indian so he could sit as normally as he could considering he was still tied up.
After settling into his new position, the Indian looked directly into Clint’s eyes and said, “Before you go after Shadow Walker, you must decide if you’re prepared to die.”
“Shadow Walker?”
The Indian nodded.
“You mean Coltraine?” Clint asked.
“Among the Crow, he is known as Shadow Walker. Someone gave him that name because he drifts from place to place without leaving a trace. When he falls over something, or someone, that thing disappears.”
“Or that person?”
Again, the Indian nodded. “Even among my people, he is feared. He’s collected followers from many tribes and he’s proven himself in blood.”
Rachel let out a humorless laugh. “I suppose you’re going to tell me he’s some kind of warrior?”
“No,” the Indian replied as he shifted his eyes toward her. He ignored the guns in her hands and looked straight into her eyes without a hint of fear.
For a moment, Rachel even forgot about the guns she held. In that bit of time, it seemed entirely possible that the Indian would jump up and attack her as if the ropes around his arms and legs were nothing but strands of thread.
“Shadow Walker is no warrior,” the Indian explained. “No more than a wolf or a bear is a warrior. Like those animals, he is a killer. Unlike those animals, he doesn’t kill for food or survival. He kills to kill. I know because I’ve seen it.”
“Now that we’re all good and scared,” Clint said, “you can tell us where to find him.”
The Indian looked over to Clint and gave him a smile. For a moment, it seemed he was going to turn mute again. He did eventually start speaking, however. When he did, words tumbled out of him like tepid water dripping from a spout.
“From here, you’ll ride north,” the Indian said. “You’ll ride just into the Crow’s land, where you’ll find a small village where the Koko people live. From there, you go west toward the hills and where the trees become thick.
“Within those trees, there is a narrow path leading to a river and the base of a larger hill. Along that hill, there will be a camp made of cabins and teepees leading up to where Shadow Walker lives.”
“Is he headed there already?”
The Indian shook his head slowly. “He still has some stops to make, so you should be able to find him.”
Clint’s eyes narrowed as he searched the Indian
’s face for any sign that he was lying. But as far as he could tell, the Indian wasn’t trying to hide anything. Then again, the Indian had yet to break a sweat after the fight, seeing his partner killed and waking up as a prisoner.
“You follow what I say and you’ll see Shadow Walker for yourself. I hope you find him. I hope more that I am there when you do.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because then I could watch as you are torn apart like a fresh deer carcass and fed to his dogs . . . just like the others who have come for him.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Clint and Rachel stepped out of the livery and into the darkened fort. Behind them, they left the big Indian tied up, blindfolded and gagged. Although most of the noise had settled down in the saloon and cathouse, things looked pretty much the same as when they’d first seen the two Indians approach them.
Rachel looked behind her and waited a few more steps before saying anything. “Why did you tell him he’d been knocked out so long? We were barely able to get him tied up before he opened his eyes again.”
“Most men tend to have fewer qualms about turning in their friends if they think they were left behind by them. At the very least, I figured it would put him off his game a bit.”
“Do you think it worked?”
Looking over his shoulder as if he could see through walls and study the Indian inside the livery, Clint replied, “Not really, no.”
“Then it was just a waste of time.”
“Have you always been so impatient?” Clint asked.
“Only when someone’s life is in the hands of a blood-thirsty killer.”
Clint stopped and looked around to make sure nobody was watching them or listening to what they were saying. Apart from a few stumbling drunks in the distance and a single, bored man in uniform at the front gate, they were completely alone.
“This was anything but a waste,” Clint told her. “How can you even think that when we found out where Coltraine is headed?”
Shadow Walker Page 8
